Here is an illustrative story that still breaks my heart, but what emerges is a great lesson.
Several years ago, I was part of a bid process for a large petroleum/retail/lodging deal. Had it been successful, I would have easily overachieved my annual numbers by June. Then, I would have spent the rest of the year clinching a President’s Club Award and would have been well-positioned to ink the majority of next year’s deals by the end of Q1.
The company in question was clearly ready for a change. Their platform was getting “long in the tooth,” their reporting was jumbled, and the pricing was above market. Their line staff and senior management understood our value story.
I try not to get ahead of myself in these situations, but in a quiet moment, I could see the outlines of a wonderful European vacation begin to emerge in the back of my mind. We went back for our “Best and Final,” and felt reasonably confident about the outcome.
Then we waited.
About a week later, we had a short, but brutal conference call. We lost the deal.
In the period between the “Best and Final” and that conference call, I let my mind wander a bit. I imagined a reasonable back and forth on the legal documents before signature. Then it was off to a normal implementation with the normal headaches. I imagined the other new logos that could emerge from the success of this deal.
And just like that, it was gone.
We requested and received an autopsy from the prospects in order to get feedback and learn from the experience.
We discovered that the prospect really liked our offer. They liked our platform. They loved our pricing. They felt that the reporting was several steps ahead of what they were currently using.
So far, so good, but what was the problem?
What we didn’t know (or failed to uncover) is that the CEO was quietly thinking about retirement in the next 12-18 months. Only a few people in the organization knew about it, but it was critical gap. This meant that our team would be managing a major enterprise level implementation right during a change in executive leadership.
Apparently, there was a side meeting—a “Come to Jesus Affair”—where the prospect explained their position to the current vendor. They would remain with their incumbent for one additional 3-year term but needed some movement on pricing and assurances on potential upgrades.
Our autopsy ended with a request that once the extended term wwas completed, the new leadership team would be ready for a change. They gave us a consolation prize by admitting that we had the best platform. However, because of the CEO’s impending retirement, we had poor timing. We were asked to try again in three years. It left us a little deflated afterwards.
Our mistake was thinking that “Qualifying the Customer” ended when the RFP was released. We missed the intangible outside of the transaction flow and platform scope. So, when events changed, we missed the boat.
As I look back at things, our team had a case of “Go-Fever.” As we worked with the prospect for the better part of a year, we qualified them in the traditional terms of size, volume, and platform bandwidth. We thought we had the right buy-in signals from throughout the organization. Had we known that the potential of a senior management shuffle might have blown up the entire deal, we would have pressed them on how it would impact our conversation. We could have had a go/no-go meeting to put them on the spot to focus on the desire for change. Sadly, for us, “the devil they knew” won the day.
So, what did I learn? Qualification means more than understanding the operational flow of transactions. We either missed or failed to listen that events that were outside of our control. We stopped qualifying during the bid process. Even though we thought we knew everything possible about the prospect, we missed an important element–the human component. In this case, we failed to ask if there was anything outside of the sales conversation that might disrupt our proposal.
You have to qualify right up to the final signature.
Payments, Fraud, and Leadership 